It really STINKS to be me right now. I just received the recovered files from a Hard Drive that went bad on me. Kroll Ontrack did the recovery. It was a choice of three different companies, all claiming to be better for one reason or another, but all tossing out a ballpark quote for the economy service (No expediting) of about $700 - $2000. The one real advantage Kroll Ontrack had over the other two companies, (CBL out of Canada and DriveSavers out of CA), was that the offered to supply a File List of what was on the drive as well as the condition of the files. Not knowing exactly what was on the disk I chose Kroll Ontrack. They essentially do about 80% of the recovery in order to obtain the file list, banking that you will decide to take the financial plunge, in other words, take a second mortgage out on your home. After seeing the file list I was stunned at how much was on the drive that I wanted. And after some negotiations I managed to get the price knocked down from a real-time quote of $1300+ to about $1000. It's still not a cheep investment.

So if you think your safe from this kind of disaster, think twice and then back up your data. So I ran out and bought a Blu-Ray burner and some Dual-Layer discs and pan to burn 50GB at a single pop to make backups of the data.

Seem like a lot of data? Well the camera I own sucks up 30MB a pic and I like to bracket my photographs and take several viewpoints of a single subject. So 16GB memory cards can get filled up pretty fast.

...just food for thought!

Now you can all confirm my insanity and have me committed at any time!

Exactly. Ideally, when I have enough money for the media, I would have my data in RAID5 array to cope with single disk failure, but also do frequent backups of the most important stuff on a separate disk, which will be only connected to the machine/network at time of syncing and stored elsewhere. This is important, because no RAID will protect your data when lightning strikes and kills your PSU, which in turn kills the disks and anything else, so not even a USB disk is safe. Or the controller gets corrupted and overwrites your data, so your disks still live but don't make any sense.

Exactly. Ideally, when I have enough money for the media, I would have my data in RAID5 array to cope with single disk failure, but also do frequent backups of the most important stuff on a separate disk, which will be only connected to the machine/network at time of syncing and stored elsewhere.

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This drive was actually a backup drive, but as the main drive size was no longer large enough it became the only copy. Again, as stated above, even a "backup drive" can fail at any time, day one, day two, etc.

Why uses DVD's? Because they don't break unsuspectingly, You can't erase them by passing a magnet over them... because that backup drive can fail on it's first access..

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Don't know about the DVDRs and BRDVDRs, but there was a problem with CDROM where the data would fade over time. Don't break unsuspectingly? You don't have a 4 yo in the house. Sorry, but IMHO, plastic unprotected disks are far more fragile and more easily damaged inadvertently than HDDs. Besides, really, when was the last time you 'accidentally' passed a magnet over a HDD?